A rapidly growing army – Goblins in Lustria introduction and week 1

A few weeks ago I started a Slow-Grow-League with some fellow gamers in my city. Three of us already play larger scale wargames for quite some time, while one is just starting a High Elf army and we do this mainly to keep him going. Other than us there are Skaven and Lizardmen – So the story was pretty clear from the beginning: The Lizardmen live isolated in their Jungles, Skaven try to mess up the place, High Elves are on an expedition… and Goblins do all kind of funny stuff. While I won’t translate my Fluff in length here (if someone really cares I can do it though 😉 ) here’s the gist of it:

My protagonist is Fuggit, a fat Goblin that had somewhat given up on life, living in a tribe dominated by Orcs, kicked around and finally ordered to get some food from a rich human’s woodland manor. He was caught in the act though and the human, Marco di Miragliano, a rich scholar tried to study Goblins by taking Fuggit on as a servant. While a hard life for humans, this was like a luxurious vacation for Fuggit, who got fat in the service of Marco over several years, learning to speak properly and even read. Well, that luck couldn’t last forever and so Marco heard of a new continent in the west – without all the evil creatures of the land he lived in and new flora and fauna to explore. So he sold all his belongings buying a ship and passage to Lustria to become famous by describing this new world. He didn’t take Fuggit there, since he deemed Goblins to be an invasive species (well he could well be right).

Now Fuggit sat at the edge of the woods, thinking of his lost friend and dreaming of a land without Orcs. He found an old and ultimately powerless Shaman in that forest, that was chased away by his tribe for his uselessness. Well he wasn’t that useless for Fuggit since he had found a book of Di Miragliano with a map to Lustria. And so the pair set out to conquer some small warbands till the Waagh was big enough to set sail from the shores of Bretonia.

While I’m writing this I actually completed the fifth week of this challenge. Due to the current situation we haven’t played a single game yet. There are some restrictions posed on us for games until 1000P – no rare choices, no elite choice more than once per army (Spear Chuckas are double that. Like it was in 7th edition), no monstrous mounts and no magic items – we have to earn both of these. While some restrictions hit me hard by limiting my options harshly, others might even help me. No magic items? Nasty Skulkers are going to run wild… And chariots are not monstrous mounts. Well I even worked those restrictions into my Fluff by labeling monsters as invasive species and prohibiting war machines to not destroy the new worlds fauna and architecture – and ways that Goblins get around those restrictions.

Let’s see what I did in week one:

This is the stuff I painted in the first week. I’ll take it apart shortly. I was sure I needed some archers first, so I painted up 21 of them. I also wanted two spear chuckas to max out on them early. I can’t deal with heavily armoured stuff otherwise and two of my opponents have a lot of that. Well I had the ninjas just in the mail at that point so I painted them up as well. The Trolls are my hammer. Can’t play them at that point but I knew I would need them sooner or later. Please excuse the shine on those models. I used a bit too much varnish and had not photographed them before… Maybe another thin coat will fix that. This doesn’t apply to the further articles though, I took pictures there before that step.

Those Bog Trolls by Satyr Art Studios are stunning. You can read my initial article here and my review of the models here. They painted up really nicely and fast. The details are crisp but there are not an abundance of them and while they look old school, they have a good size to them. I liked the models initially but after painting them I like them even more.

The Spear Chuckas and their crew don’t actually belong together but I think they both fit well. I used the crew for the GW spear thrower. The left one is an old Orc ballista. The Goblins in the army were opressed by Orcs and hate them so I had to use some Goblins. The other one is by Knightmare Miniatures. This time I was just to lazy to search for the correct crew and some of them fit very well in regiments, so they’ll have to serve at another place.

Speaking of regiments, the first one consists of all the Goblin archers by Knightmare Miniatures I could finde. Those are actually all models available and some of them multiple times. It’s a shame that such a popular choice only has so few models. There might be some other ones, but I singled out the normal Goblins, the Night Goblin ones will have to wait for another time. The banner bearer is standing alone since I guess I won’t use him that often. A musician is important in 8th edition but I don’t want my archers in melee and thus I won’t really need a banner. This one is an old Heartbreaker model that is now sold by Impact Miniatures and Ral Partha Europe. Both companies use different materials and I do have both, but more on that in a later article.

Now for the characters: I got a Shaman by the same companies of the banner bearer, a boss, which was a limited release by Maxmini. They are no longer in business and their range was recently bought by TTCombat. I didn’t order this guy when he was released… and paid for that mistake by searching for more than two years to even see one on eBay. I paid double, but that was still an ok price. I think he fits in very well with my more civilized mean Goblins. There is an option to give a boss a bow and so he will be kitted out with this option in game. The Nasty Skulkers are by Cavalcade Miniatures. I had to wait for those for some time as well, because they weren’t available for some months and came back at a slight cost increase. While I found these earlier, I actually got some more Goblin ninjas by CP Miniatures earlier and wrote a review here. While all of those don’t fit the idea of the army that well, I wanted to play with only newly painted miniatures and those were some of the few I had lying around that could fit the role. They are nice miniatures as well and here’s a review of them if you haven’t seen yet.

In the back you can actually already see some stuff from the week after… I’ll be back soon with an overview of what I did in the second week.

[…] the interesting part: The Troll kids are of course smaller than Trolls (yes I actually painted those since the last review), but seemed still a bit bigger. The included bases for them are 25mm. The […]